“translation layers”, externally sold content, and unsandboxed apps

So Apple ended up relenting on most of the requirements introduced at the same time as subscriptions. Apple does still require that apps not sell digital content in the app itself through means other than in-app purchases, or link to a place where this is done, however. I would say this is a reasonable way to provide an incentive for these products to be offered as in-app purchases, were it not first for the fact the agency model used for ebooks in particular (but I’m sure other kind of digital goods are affected) does not allow for 30% of the price to go to Apple, even if the price used in-app is 43% higher than the price out of the app, and second for the fact some catalogs (Amazon’s Kindle one, obviously, but it must be a pain for other actors too) cannot even be made to fit in Apple’s in-app database.

John Gruber thinks this is not Apple’s problem, but at the same time Apple has to exist in reality at some point. Besides, I don’t think Apple is entitled over the whole lifetime of an app to 30% of any purchase where the buying intent originated from the app. Regardless of whether you think it’s fair or not, competitors will eventually catch up in this area and offer better conditions to publishers, making it untenable for Apple to keep this requirement. But it’s not fair either for Apple to shoulder for free the cost of screening, listing, hosting, etc. these “free” clients that in fact enable a lot of business. Maybe apps could be required to ensure the first 10$ of purchases made in the app can be paid only using tokens bought through in-app purchase (thus avoiding the issue of exposing all SKUs to Apple), then only could they directly take users’ money.

But what this edict has done anyway—besides making the Kobo, Kindle, etc. apps quite inscrutable by forcing them to remove links to their respective stores—is hurt Apple’s credibility with respect to developer announcements. Last year they prohibited Flash “translation layers”, and this prohibition had already been in application (to the extent that it could be enforced, anyway) for a few months when they relented on it. This year they dictated these rules for apps selling digital content, rejecting new apps for breaking them before these rules were even known, with existing apps having until the end of June to comply, only for Apple to significantly relax these rules at the beginning of June (and leave until the end of July to comply). This means that in both cases developers were actually better off doing nothing and waiting to see what Apple would actually end up enforcing. I was about to wonder how many Mac developers were actually scrambling to implement sandboxing, supposed to be mandatory in the Mac App Store by November, but it turns out Apple may have jumped the gun at the very least here too, as they just extended the deadline to March. In the future, Apple may claim that they warned developers of such things in advance but the truth is most of the stuff they warned about did not come to pass in the way they warned it would, so why should developers heed these “warnings”?